Azure or AWS cloud? When it comes to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, or IaaS (sometimes called cloud servers), it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of each. Either way, both Amazon Web Services EC2 and Microsoft Azure VM are solid IaaS platforms that give organizations access to vast computing resources housed in data centers throughout the world.

While AWS was the first major player in the cloud computing game, getting an early start in 2006, IT pros generally agree Microsoft’s Azure matches up in many areas even though Azure didn’t launch until 2010. However, the commonly-held belief is that Amazon maintains the lead with features and is more powerful especially if you want to scale applications. But many IT pros also say Microsoft Azure is easier to use out-of-the-box and more user-friendly for Windows admins.

That said, both providers continually improve their offerings, adding new capabilities and lowering prices, so comparing one versus the other is somewhat of a moving target. In the end, most everyone in Spiceworks says choosing which IaaS vendor is the best for you really “just depends” on your individual needs and priorities.

Said IT pro mattmcnabb, “Microsoft and Amazon are in stiff competition here and so tend to keep a pretty level playing field with regard to feature sets, but if you have very specific needs one service may play out better than the other.” With many proponents on both sides, how do you decide? Here’s a high level breakdown of both the similarities and differences between AWS and Azure to help you choose which of the two dominant Cloud providers is best:

AWS and Azure Cloud Comparison Information

Geographical distribution of Amazon and Microsoft data centers

Both Amazon and Microsoft have data centers located throughout the world, in many similar locations to support major computing hubs. Both AWS and Azure services offer options for load balancing and replication across regions as well.

As of April 2017, AWS had more existing and planned locations, but Azure was stronger in certain regions such as India, where they had 3 data centers compared to 2 for AWS. In terms of growth, both Amazon and Microsoft added about 10 locations over the course of the last 10 months.

Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS pricing

Costs between the two major players are very similar, with each provider offering a huge variety of differently sized instances to fit the needs of different organizations. Both companies also offer discounts if you pay in advance, typically on a yearly basis.

Amazon Web Services charges for instance usage by the hour, whereas Microsoft Azure charges by the minute. So if you use an AWS for 1 hour and 2 minutes, you’d be charged for 2 hours of usage because they round up to the next hour.

Another difference is that Azure instances each include a fixed amount of storage, but with AWS, you’ll need to purchase storage separately at an additional cost. The upside is that AWS storage is highly customizable to your needs, the downside being that pricing and setup is not as straightforward.

Azure and AWS offer multiple tiers of support ranging from free to tens of thousands of dollars per month. Pricing varies depending on promised initial response time (which can be quicker than 15 minutes if you pay up), access to a technical account manager, support for third party software, access to phone support, number of users, and more.

The paid tech support offerings for IaaS provided by Amazon and Microsoft vary a bit so there isn’t necessarily a 1:1 comparison in all areas. For example, AWS support costs vary on a sliding usage scale tied to monthly usage fees, while a comparable Azure support plan costs a flat monthly amount. To see exact details, follow the links to the support plan information below:

Both Microsoft Azure VM and Amazon AWS EC2 strive for greater than 99.95% availability and as of June 2016, both offer a 10% credit to customers if service availability drops below that figure in a given month. If uptime ever goes below a 99% (two nines) in a month, that credit jumps to 25% for Azure and 30% for Amazon. Both tend to stay close to their goals, but both AWS and Azure have experienced periodic outages that affected popular services like Netflix, Office 365, and more.

Azure vs AWS: IT pro perceptions

What do IT professionals, who ultimately set up and manage IaaS cloud services, think about Azure and AWS? In the Spiceworks, they’ve discussed merits of each platform, answered questions, and shared their opinions on the Microsoft and Amazon offerings. Here’s what they had to say both in aggregate and in their own words:

Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine is known for:

Being highly-trusted and user-friendly by IT pros familiar with Microsoft products

Integrating with your on-premises Windows or Hyper-V servers in a hybrid cloud

Ease-of-use and simple set up from the Microsoft portal

Being convenient for Windows admins because they don’t have to learn a new platform

Making it easy to quickly stand up Microsoft services in the cloud, with offerings such as Azure Active Directory, and Azure SQL Database

Playing catch-up with Amazon Web Services but quickly closing the gaps in their offering and rapidly adding new users

Amazon Web Services EC2 is known for:

Being a pioneer in Cloud Computing that continually introduces new features

Having a very highly configurable, feature-rich, and powerful offering that’s a bit complicated but allows for lots of customization

Being useful for running web-scale products (popular examples include Netflix and Yelp, who serve their millions of users using AWS)

Being great for running non-Windows services, for example with Linux web servers

Providing support for a huge number of 3rd party integrations

Not being easy to move data away from if you want to change providers

Quotes from IT professionals about Amazon EC2 and Azure VM:

On Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2):

“Relatively easy to get going, and FAST, even with the most basic resources. Has been absolutely reliable. From sign-up to first VM was just a couple minutes. Still exploring the configurations, and honestly it's feature deep but not as brain-candy simple as Azure. Pricing needs to be much more simple too.” - Nick42 – July 10, 2014

“Been using AWS for a few years now and love it. If you're not looking to use state of the art tools or new innovations in cloud computing I suggest you go to Azure. If you wanna learn Linux some awesome AWS CLI commands and automated nearly everything go with AWS.” - zuphzuph - March 11, 2016

"AWS is a pretty solid product. You need to have a fair bit of technical knowledge to get it all set up and working, but if you're starting out, you can benefit from the "Free Tier", which is free for the first year for a certain amount of resources." - Oliver Kinne - Oct 8, 2014

On Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine and SQL:

"Amazon has been the leader in this space for a while, but Azure is growing at an incredible rate. For instance, Linux now accounts for 25% of all VM deployments in Azure, up from 20% 6 months ago. Just a couple years ago AWS was the go-to for Linux deployments in the cloud. The IaaS and PaaS spaces are changing at such an incredible rate that what was true 6 months or a year ago can be false now." - mattmcnabb - March 10, 2016

"The functionality and capabilities of Microsoft Azure continue to increase as the product maintains its position as one of the best cloud computing platforms and infrastructure providers. It is integrated tightly with other Microsoft services, and provides business the needed infrastructure to operate when they don’t have millions to invest in IT infrastructure." - JKHigg - Sep 30, 2015

"I'm still not convinced that Azure/AWS is cheaper than on premises however, the additional services that both offer make them very interesting in that respect. And if I never have to touch a server again I'll be quite happy." - M Boyle - May 13, 2015

“With SQL Azure in about 10 minutes you can have a database which is fully encrypted and replicated across 1000s miles with 3 nodes in each location running the database. The time, effort and cost to do that with (on-premises) VMs and installing SQL server enterprise in it is eye watering more expensive.” - richardmoore - March 10, 2016

Azure vs AWS: Are they right for you? How to decide?

In the end, which cloud vendor is right for you all comes down to your needs and how each platform works for your organization. Fortunately, most cloud providers including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google offer free credits that you can use to evaluate their services with before making the big plunge.

Once you actually use each platform you can decide 1) if the cloud is right for you and 2) Whether Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or some combination of both works best for you.

I still struggle to get my head around the idea of IaaS despite using several SaaS products now.

The article has helped but the pricing still leaves me confused as to how this can save money. I guess it depends on many factors and the pricing structures would require some very careful planning. I'd be seriously looking at it if I had to set up a new office from scratch though.

There are some conflicting responses to pricing when it comes to cloud vs on-premise. Without background information, these remarks are completely useless.

It depends on your use of the servers, both in capacity and demand of the services the "server" provides and these things vary greatly depending on the business you have.

For SMB's who want to host their own website / mail server for example, I'm pretty sure that putting it on AWS or Azure will come out cheaper. If on the other hand you have a company with huge databases or other applications with lots of data that work day and night, TOC preference will switch over on-premise.

It would be nice to see some real world examples and graphs in an article like this to show where that tipping point is. It would be telling us way more than 2 or 3 comments from users that are contradicting each other about the same products.

I have a couple of very small servers on AWS EC2. One thing I didn't appreciate going in is the way Amazon calculates a CPU usage allowance. I'm ok as long as my servers go along at 1% or 2% CPU usage. They can go above that for short times if needed, but that burns through their CPU credits, and if they stay that way too long they will use the credits up and start becoming unresponsive. At the low end where my servers are it can be a little tricky to keep their utilization that low.

I did the free 30-day test with Azure and I didn't notice any similar calculation of credits going on.

Nice comparison. Your readers might also find real user reviews for AWS and Azure on IT Central Station to be helpful.

Users interested in these solutions also read reviews for Oracle Java Cloud Service. This user writes, "We now have the ability to very quickly develop/modify and deploy applications with a geographically distributed team using agile methodologies, whilst avoiding environment specific problems." You can read the rest of his review here: https://goo.gl/IQZjZR.